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The Daily Show:

Award-winning journalist Patrick McGee joins Jon Stewart to discuss how Apple built China in his new book Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company. They talk about Apple “sleepwalking” into this crisis, building a competitive market in Xi Jinping’s authoritarian state, the vocational training that boosted rivals, how Trump’s attempted Apple boycott backfired, and whether investments may be facilitating the annexation of Taiwan.

Terrific interview. I’m a few chapters into the book, and it’s good. McGee’s a good writer and a serious reporter — the depth of his research shows. It feels not like a few stories padded out to book length, but instead the distillation of a complex story that demands an entire book to tell.

Link: youtube.com/watch?v=NAj9zB4vaZc

The Sunday Times of London ran a good excerpt from Patrick McGee’s Apple in China (News+ link, in case you need it): The ripple effect from Apple’s investments across Chinese industry was accelerated by a rule imposed by Apple that its suppliers could be no more than 50 ...

The first Homebrew Website Club Düsseldorf Schepp and I co-organised turned out well. We gathered at Düsseldorf’s central library inside its “Xafé” café. We had 7 participating adults and 2 children. ;)

The meetup was more exchange and discussions than actual work on one’s websites. Discussed topics included:

• “I want to build my own website”
• Opinions on tooling
• RelMeAuth
• Podcast metric aggregation
• WebSub
• Personal publishing workflows and tools
• Image hosting
• RSS feeds
• …and probably even a few more.

Very enjoyable evening!

IndieNewsIndieNews DE

Barry Ritholtz, in an excerpt from his brand-new book, How Not to Invest, marking the occasion of the 24th anniversary of Cliff Edwards’s claim chowder hall of famer, predicting doom for Apple’s then-new foray into its own chain of retail stores: There are many genuinely...

In a recent Vlogbrothers video and in his newsletter, Hank Green talked about how we don’t take enough notice of the things that quietly keep us alive, healthy, and safe. The tragedy of prevention goes like this: The most effective way to save lives (prevention) is the l...

Pre-show: 🗣️ New ATP Member Special: ATP Top Four: Game Consoles 🗣️ Follow-up: Home Networking Corner 🤝🏻 Vision Pro Corner How I use my AVP to retrofit Unifi Access Points in finished homes SSDs and long-term storage was covered on Security Now #1023 (via Paul Chernof...

Meet the New American Refugees Fleeing Across State Lines for Safety. They include a history teacher harassed for pledging to “teach the truth”, a doctor specializing in high-risk pregnancies, and a family w/ a trans teen.

💬 Join the discussion on kottke.org →

Where is the courage and morality of our political leaders? “Corruption and greed have eroded morality in public life. Powerful people who do what is right are in short supply.”

I was going slightly spare at the fact that every talk at this Anthropic developer conference has used the word "agents" dozens of times, but nobody ever stopped to provide a useful definition.

I'm now in the "Prompting for Agents" workshop and Anthropic's Hannah Moran finally broke the trend by saying that at Anthropic:

Agents are models using tools in a loop

I can live with that! I'm glad someone finally said it out loud.

Tags: anthropic, generative-ai, ai-agents, ai, llms

Updated Anthropic model comparison table A few details in here about Claude 4 that I hadn't spotted elsewhere: The training cut-off date for Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4 is March 2025! That's the most recent cut-off for any of the current popular models, really impress...

In this video, musician Armin Küpper performs a saxophone duet with the echo of his past self by playing near the end of a large pipe. That’s pretty cool. And it’s also a learning opportunity! Hey wait, come back…you haven’t finished your bowl of physics yet: What you he...

llm-anthropic 0.16 New release of my LLM plugin for Anthropic adding the new Claude 4 Opus and Sonnet models. You can see pelicans on bicycles generated using the new plugin at the bottom of my live blog covering the release. I also released llm-anthropic 0.16a1 which works ...

PBS executives forced the makers of an Art Spiegelman documentary to cut derogatory mentions of Donald Trump from the film before it could air. “If PBS isn’t going to stand up for free speech, who is?”

Use of semicolons by UK authors has dropped by nearly half over the past two decades. “Many writers hooked on semicolons become an embarrassment to their families and friends.” (I got a 10/10 on the semicolon quiz.)

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I'm at Anthropic's Code with Claude event, where they are launching Claude 4. I'll be live blogging the keynote here.

Tags: llm-release, liveblogging, anthropic, claude, generative-ai, ai, llms, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, claude-4

Donald Trump is waging war on the future; he’s attempting to destroy America’s democracy, its economic future, a sustainable climate future, and science. “The aim, whether stated explicitly or not, is to erase the future as Americans have understood it.”

I’m Not Going There Anymore. Tony Wheeler (co-founder of Lonely Planet) lists four places he’s not going back to, including Saudi Arabia, Russia, and the USA.

Honestly, the new Fujifilm X half looks really appealing. I think there should be way more playful digital cameras, too - like this one.

If your library doesn't have any documentation, it can't have any bugs.

Documentation specifies what your code is supposed to do. Your tests specify what it actually does.

Bugs exist when your test-enforced implementation fails to match the behavior described in your documentation. Without documentation a bug is just undefined behavior.

If you aim to follow semantic versioning you bump your major version when you release a backwards incompatible change. Such changes cannot exist if your code is not comprehensively documented!

Inspired by a half-remembered conversation I had with Tom Insam many years ago.

Tags: testing, semantic-versioning, documentation

Plantations Burning Down To The Ground Is A Good Thing. A former forced labor camp is not a good place to get married!